fuel. Small pieces of fuselage began to drift toward the sea.
No! Oh, Christ, no!
For several long seconds, Janson felt perfectly numb. He closed his eyes and reopened them: Had he imagined it?
A detached propeller twirled lazily before it crashed into the sea.
Oh, dear God.
It was a catastrophe such as none he had ever witnessed. At once, his heart felt squeezed, hard, harder. Theo. Theo Katsaris, the closest thing he had to a son. A man who loved him, and whom he loved. "Let me stay behind," Theo had begged him, and - out of vanity, out of pride - Janson had refused him.
Dead. Incinerated before his eyes.
In a kaleidoscope, he saw the faces of the others. Taciturn, even-tempered Manuel Honwana. Andressen: loyal, methodical, reliable, soft-spoken - easily underestimated precisely because he was so devoid of self-regard. Sean Hennessy, whom he had spirited out of an English prison cell, only to serve with a death sentence. Donna Hedderman, too - the luckless American do-gooder.
Gone. Dead because of him.
And Peter Novak. The greatest humanitarian of a new century. A giant among men. The peacemaker. A man who had once saved Janson's life. And the object of the entire mission.
Dead.
Cremated, three thousand feet above the Indian Ocean.
An incredible triumph had turned, now that day broke, into a nightmare.
It was no accident, no engine malfunction. The double explosion - the blast that preceded, by a few crucial seconds, the burst of combusted fuel - was telltale. What had occurred was the result of craft and design. Such craft and design that four of the best men he knew had been murdered, along with one of the best men anybody had ever known.
What the hell had happened? Who could have planned such a thing? When had the plans been laid?
And why? For God's sakes, why?
Janson sagged to the floor of the RIB, paralyzed by grief, futility, rage; for a moment, in the open sea, he felt as if he were in a crypt, with a heavy weight on his chest. Breathing was impossible. The very blood that sluiced through his veins seemed to congeal. The heaving sea beckoned, with its antidote of everlasting oblivion. He was harrowed, tormented, and deeply afraid, and he knew just how to put a stop to it.
But that was not an option.
He would have given his life for any of theirs. He knew that now.
But that was not an option.
Only he survived.
And in some calculating part of his mind, a clockwork mechanism spooled with a hard, icy rage. He had taken arms against a compound of fanatics, only to succumb to something far more diabolical. Outrage infused his soul with a near cryogenic frost. Emotions like despondency and grief had to give way before a larger emotion, an absolute and unyielding thirst for justice, and it was that emotion that commanded him not to succumb to the other emotions. He was the one left alive - left to find out what had just happened.
And why.
CHAPTER NINE
PART TWO
CHAPTER NINE
Washington, D.C.
"The prime directive here is secrecy," the man from the Defense Intelligence Agency said to the others in the room. With his thick, dark eyebrows, broad shoulders, and brawny forearms, he had the look of someone who worked with his hands; in fact, Douglas Albright was an intensely cerebral man, given to brooding and deliberation. He held a Ph.D. in comparative politics and another graduate degree in the foundations of game theory. "Secrecy is priority number one, two, and three. There should be no confusion about that."
Such confusion was unlikely, for the imperative even accounted for the unlikely venue for the hastily convened meeting. The Meridian International Center was located on Crescent Place, just off Sixteenth Street on Meridian Hill. A blandly handsome building in the neoclassical style that was the architectural lingua franca of official Washington, it was anything but eye-catching. Its charms were discreet and had much to do with its curious status as a building that was not owned by the federal government - the center billed itself a nonprofit educational and cultural institution - but was almost entirely devoted to very private government functions. The center had an elegant front entrance of carved oak; of greater importance was the side entrance, accessible from a private driveway, which enabled dignitaries to arrive and depart without attracting notice. Though it was just a mile from the White House, the center had significant advantages for certain meetings, especially interdepartmental conclaves that had no formal justification. Meetings here did not involve the